Load EVA-CLIP (PuLID)

Load EVA-CLIP (PuLID) (PuLIDEVACLIPLoader) is the most boring node in the pack, and that's by design. It has no inputs at all - zero knobs, no dropdown, nothing to set - and one job: load the EVA-CLIP visual model that turns your reference face into visual features for the Apply node.

You need it because PuLID doesn't work on a face embedding alone. InsightFace's ArcFace gives you who the person is (biometric identity), but EVA-CLIP gives you what the face looks like - texture, hair, skin detail. The Apply node fuses both into its identity tokens, and this loader is where the second half comes from.

How it works

Under the hood it's open-clip loading EVA02-L-14-336 with the merged2b_s6b_b61k pretrained weights, and it keeps only the visual tower (the model.visual half). First time you run a workflow, it downloads roughly 800MB from HuggingFace and hangs on that download while it fetches - that's normal, not a freeze, give it a minute. After that it's cached globally inside the pack, so subsequent runs are instant and the model only reloads if you change devices mid-session.

The one output, EVA_CLIP, plugs into the eva_clip input of Apply PuLID ✦ Flux.2. It isn't a text encoder you use anywhere else, and you can't meaningfully swap in a different CLIP - the PuLID weights were trained against this exact EVA variant.

Install

It ships with the iFayens/ComfyUI-PuLID-Flux2 pack:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/iFayens/ComfyUI-PuLID-Flux2.git
cd ComfyUI-PuLID-Flux2
pip install insightface onnxruntime-gpu open-clip-torch safetensors ml_dtypes==0.3.2

Or just search "ComfyUI-PuLID-Flux2" in ComfyUI Manager and restart. The dependency that matters here is open-clip-torch - that's what actually pulls and runs EVA-CLIP.

The one gotcha that matters

Do not install eva_clip from GitHub. The README says this twice, and it's the kind of warning that exists because people ignored it. The GitHub eva_clip package is broken and unrelated to what this node uses - open-clip handles the download automatically. If you've already installed it and things are misbehaving, uninstall it and let open-clip do its thing.

Two more practical notes: if the first run errors instead of downloading, you're missing open-clip-torch or your Python env can't reach HuggingFace. And a silent failure here is usually visible elsewhere - if Apply PuLID throws about EVA-CLIP, this is the node to re-check first.